A few times over the years she’d thought about going up there and knocking on his door and saying to him, Michael it’s me. Ruth. From the valley. Come. Sit with me at least.

Once not long after her thirtieth birthday she’d come up this far along the path with a box of her brother’s old dominoes in her pocket. All the way along the river and up over the slick black rocks on the west side of the beck to the top, with the game’s smooth pieces chinking against each other and her thumb fidgeting with the sliding wooden lid, she’d rehearsed what she’d say to Creed when she reached him: that it was crazy, idiotic, them living like this – the two of them in this vast forgotten garden of bracken and stone and pasture and bog, like the very last people on earth, but never speaking, never coming close to one another.

She’d pictured them both at his table, her brother’s dominoes spread out between them in various arrangements, not speaking perhaps (neither of them had much practice at that) but at least sitting together in a not-uncomfortable silence. Then up here at the big flat stone at the top of the path she’d lost her nerve. In the distance, his thick-walled bothy with its arrow-slit windows had looked so closed-in and stubborn and hunched against the weather and the world, so like a fortress for his feelings, that she’d lacked the courage to go on and had turned around and gone back down.

Today she was wearing her brown work boots and her black coat and her blue dress and she hoped she looked respectable. She didn’t want Michael Creed to open his door and look at her and think she was a fright.

She’d been a child when his wife died, ten or eleven years old.

She remembered the two of them coming to her father’s church. The wife’s dark hair. Creed a young man, broad-shouldered and strong, with a neat beard.

Her father had gone up there a dozen times afterwards and tried to comfort him but Creed wouldn’t let him in the house. She remembered how tired and discouraged her father had looked the last time he came home.

‘What happened, William? What did he say to you?’ her mother had asked, rather fearfully, and they’d all watched him hang up his coat and press his lips together and set down his Bible on their kitchen table and tap it lightly with his fingers. He’d looked as if he was debating with himself whether to repeat in front of his family what Creed had said.